Tuesday, August 22, 2006

73. The Art of Page Turning

Reprinted without permission from Edmonton Centre newsletter, Canada, and Canadian RCCO newsletter.

The following program notes are from an unidentified piano recital.

Tonight's page turner, Ruth Spelke, studied under Ivan Schmertnick at the Boris Nitsky School of Page Turning in Philadelphia. She has been turning pages here and abroad for many years for some of the world's leading pianists.

In 1988, Ms. Spelke won the Wilson Page Turning Scholarship, which sent her to Israel to study page turning from left to right. She is winner of the 1984 Rimsky Korsakov Flight of the Bumblebee Prestissimo Medal, having turned 47 pages in an unprecedented 32 seconds. She was also a 1983 silver medalist at the Klutz Musical Page Pickup Competition: contestants retrieve and rearrange a musical score dropped from a Yamaha. Ms. Spelke excelled in "grace, swiftness, and especially poise."

For techniques, Ms. Spelke performs both the finger-licking and the bent-page corner methods. She works from a standard left bench position, and is the originator of the dipped-elbow page snatch, a style used to avoid obscuring the pianist's view of the music. She is page turner in residence in Fairfield Iowa, where she occupies the coveted Alfred Hitchcock Chair at the Fairfield Page Turning Institute.

Ms. Spelke is married, and has a nice house on a lake.Orchestra Personnel Standards

Thursday, August 10, 2006

72. A Few Quotes

"Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!" George Bernard Shaw

"The preservation of the access of knowledge among the lowest ranks is of more importance to the public than all the property (and advice) of all the rich men in the country." - John Adams

"Religion easily has the best bullshit story of all time. Think about it. Religion has convinced people that there's an invisible man...living in the sky. Who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn't want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, and burn, and scream, until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you. He loves you and he needs money." George Carlin

"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich." - Napoleon Bonaparte

"I'm an atheist and I thank God for it." - George Bernard Shaw

"If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat." - Jean-Paul Sartre

T. S. Eliot on Djuna Barnes"It might be said of Miss Barnes, who is uncontestably one of the original writers of our time, that never has so much genius been combined with so little talent"

"The marriage begins when you get out of bed." - George Burns

Chippewa Song (adapted from the translation by Frances Densmore)SometimesI go about pitying myselfand all the timeI am being carried on great winds across the sky.

"There are four kinds of people in the world – those in love, those who are trying to get ahead, those who look on and watch the others, and those who are merely stupid. The last-named ones are the happiest." - Richard Needham

Quotes For Today (From The Quotable Investor)

“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wicked of men will do the most wicked of things for the greatest good of everyone.” John Maynard Keynes

“The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.” James Branch Cabell

“Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianty without hell.” Frank Borman

“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.” Franklin Roosevelt, 1937 Inaugural Address

“Never let yesterday use up too much of today.” Will Rogers

"Most economists use statistics like drunks use lampposts: for support more than for light." Winston Churchill